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By Root 1537 0

part of his report. Under riparian water law, to give everyone a water right for twenty irrigated acres was impossible if you gave everyone a neat little square of land. Some squares would contain much greater stream footage than others, and their owners would have too much water compared with the others. The property boundaries would therefore have to be gerrymandered to give everyone a sufficient piece of the stream. That was one way you could help avert the monopolization of water. Another way was to insist that people use their water rights, not hold on to them in the hope that cities would grow up and one could make a killing someday selling water to them. An unused water right should revert—let us say after five years—to the public trust so someone else could claim it.

Doing all this, Powell reasoned, might help assure that water would be used equitably, but not necessarily efficiently. Ideally, to get through drier months and times of drought, you needed a reservoir in a good location—at a low altitude, and on the main branch of a stream. That way you could get more efficient storage of water—a dam only twice as large, but lower down, might capture five times as much water as a smaller one upstream. Also, you could then irrigate the lower valley lands, which usually have better soil and a longer growing season. In any event, an on-stream storage reservoir was, from the point of view of irrigation, preferable to small shallow ponds filled with diverted streamwater, the typical irrigation reservoirs of his day; the ponds evaporated much greater amounts of water and displaced valuable cropland.

But who, Powell asked, was building on-stream reservoirs? Practically no one. Homesteaders couldn’t build them at all, let alone build them right, nor could groups of homesteaders—unless perhaps they were Mormons. Such dams required amounts of capital and commitment that were beyond the limits of aggregations of self-interested mortals. Private companies probably couldn’t build good irrigation projects, either, nor even states. Sooner or later, the federal government would have to get into the irrigation business or watch its efforts to settle the West degenerate into failure and chaos. Once it realized that, it would have to undertake a careful survey of the soil characteristics so as not to waste a lot of money irrigating inferior land with drainage problems. And (he implied rather than stated) the government ought to put J. W. Powell in charge; the General Land Office, which would otherwise be responsible, was, as anyone could see, “a gigantic illustration of the evils of badly directed scientific work.”

Having gone this far, Powell figured he might as well go the whole route. Fences, for example, bothered him. What was the sense of every rancher enclosing his land with a barbed-wire fence? Fenced lands tended to be unevenly grazed, and fences were obvious hazards to cattle in winter storms. Fencing was also a waste of time and money, especially in a region where rainfall could skid from twenty to six inches in successive years and someone was lucky to survive at all, let alone survive while constantly repairing and replacing fences. Individually fenced lands were a waste of resources, too; it takes a lot more tin, Powell reasoned, to make five eight-ounce cans than to make one forty-ounce can. The sensible thing was for farms to be clustered together and the individually owned lands treated as a commons, an ejido, with a single fence around the perimeter.

States bothered Powell, too. Their borders were too often nonsensical. They followed rivers for convenience, then struck out in a straight line, bisecting mountain ranges, cutting watersheds in half. Boxing out landscapes, sneering at natural reality, they were wholly arbitrary and, therefore, stupid. In the West, where the one thing that really mattered was water, states should logically be formed around watersheds. Each major river, from the glacial drip at its headwaters to the delta at its mouth, should be a state or semistate. The great state of Upper Platte River.